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Incorporating version control into your deployment process (assuming you have one…), like regular exercise, balancing your checking account, and eating more green vegetables, is something you know you really ought to do but never quite get around to doing. In part because we’re going through a minor overhaul of our processes at work and in part because I’m interested in working with git and automation, I’ve started banging around with GitHub, webhooks, and various third-party deployment services.

I’ll say that I’ve learned more about Linux file permissions than I’ve ever wanted to know, and I’m growing disturbingly comfortable with vi. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but I’d like whatever process I finally land on to be as simple as possible, and, most importantly, to be portable. I’ve been doing some interesting things with server-side scripts, and while I’m fairly pleased with the outcome so far I’m not very confident that what I’ve come up with would translate to, for instance, a brand spankin’ new server without a fair bit of configuration. It’s definitely nowhere near a plug-and-play setup.

I’ve seen some success with third-party alternatives. FTPloy in particular has been relatively simple to set up and works pretty well. The big downside, such as it is, is that you’re basically just asking another website to grab the files from GitHub and FTP them to your site. The initial deployment is, as you’d imagine, fairly lengthy, but subsequent updates are fast. You gain the benefits of version control and it’s very portable, but you lose the speed of a git pull/checkout.

Spending so much time screwing around with logistics instead of working on the site itself is frustrating, but I’m banking on this paying off in the long run.